Filed under theatre …

Mar 10 2012
35 Comments
australia, Belvoir, classics, Malthouse, PERFORMANCE, Simon Stone, theatre

The Wild Duck: The Slapified Ibsen (review/essay)

Here, a disclaimer: if you have liked The Wild Duck, that is your prerogative and I respect it. If you are going to disagree with me, please do not suggest that I hate all Australian, Melbourne, mainstage, or theatre theatre, because I don’t. Also don’t bring up anything along the lines of: we must support our artists/the general audience needs no reason to avoid theatre further/I am mean and/or envious which makes me look bad. I have taken considerable time out of my schedule to write this, in hotels in Malaysia and sublets in Berlin, because it nagged at me, as an intellectual problem.

I was very disappointed with Simon Stone’s The Wild Duck (at Malthouse, on loan from Sydney’s Belvoir). After it received very positive reviews and many awards from a variety of sources, I expected a masterpiece. After Thyestes, I expected a masterpiece. The Wild Duck is a competently executed production, it is good, but I believe it isn’t even very good. Its underpinning dramaturgical logic is questionable, it talks down to the audience, it has nothing to say about Ibsen’s original, and whether it succeeds in its intended effect largely relies on the audience not having any familiarity with the play.

I suspect there are two underlying reasons why I disliked The Wild Duck. Firstly, I have not seen much Melbourne mainstage work in 2011; hence, I am not used to its largely poor level of execution. The mainstage theatre I still see I hold to as high a standard as I can muster. Secondly, I re-read the play a few nights before seeing the work. I am pretty sure that did not make me Stone’s intended audience. I did it strategically, however: I wanted to see an interpretation, not a play. since The Wild Duck has been billed as an interpretation, as done after Ibsen, I didn’t want to be distracted by the plot. This is not only a perfectly legitimate way of viewing theatre, it is also the one that is in order when we watch classics informedly.

Simon Stone, and in fact many Australian theatre directors, often explains his position within theatre as a sort of evangelist, a priest of classical prophets. He has read and found these plays, and he would love to bring them to the general public, is how he often speaks in interviews and program notes. He will do what it takes to bring them closer to the average man, because he wants to convey the beauty of the classics. But Stone appears to understand these works primarily as stories: not even moral or philosophical tales, but stories as in complex plots which, by compacting time and space, bring a story format to salient moral quandaries of their time.

However, that is not all that a classical play is.

A classical play is important because of its role in its time. Specificaly, Ibsen’s plays are important for many more reasons than pure story-telling. They are important because (in no particular order): Ibsen brought realism to theatre *, dramatising the Norwegian bourgeois class and its moral quandaries; he particularly focused on moral quandaries that were salient in his times, particularly the many questions of equality within families (wives, children) and that of truth, and how long-held lies and secrets corrupt both public and private organisations, families and the state likewise; because many of his moral quandaries were not at all discussed at the time, and his dramatisation were speech acts in their own right; because he was a great innovator of dramatic language, simplifying and liberating the stage from oppressive, long monologues and introducing chatter and conversational language to the stage.

* Placing the Chekhovian gun on the wall, I would like to remark here that Ibsen has been a long, unsurpassed grandfather influence to much too much British (and in one remove Australian) drama: condensing the great moral questions of our time to a two-hour dinner party sometimes appears to be the only structuring logic the average (not fine, however) Anglophone playwright has known since about the 1950s.

The British theatrical tradition, to which Australia is heir, holds dearly the belief that the text contains everything, and that the director’s role is to ‘honour the text’. But this really is not, and cannot, be the case: the theatre, as we know from Peter Brook, is a moment in space and time shared between the performer and the audience. A play is of its own space and time, but the performer and the audience are often from another. The moment of theatre, the original moment that made this play an important play, cannot be recreated ad infinitum until the end of time, at any corner of the globe. This is why interpretation is such an important part of what theatre is: every staging is an interpretation, a translation/betrayal of the text, which was always only a pretext, in order to re-create the moment of mitspiel or co-play of performer and audience by any means necessary: the theatrical moment that is the essence of theatre.

Like any translation, a theatrical interpretation ages and needs to constantly evolve: there is not a definitive interpretation of any play whatsoever. Patrice Pavis, the great father of contemporary European dramaturgical theory, perhaps puts it most eloquently in his book Theatre at the Crossroads of Culture:

For a long time criticism of the classics and interpretation of mise en scene have acted as if time had done no more than cover the text with layers of dust; in order to make the text respectable, it was enough to clean up and get rid of the deposits which history, layers of interpretation, and hermeneutic sediment had left on an essentially untouched text. This phantasmatic image of the classical text could develop not only into an attempt to reconstruct archeologically the historical conditions of performance, but also into a modernization of performance style (classics in modern dress, gadgets alluding anachronistically to contemporary life). In each case, ‘dusting’ the text entails an idealist assumption according to which correcting classical language is all one needs to do to reach the level of the dictional world and of the ideologemes reduced to an objet fixe, a mixture of ancient and modern times.

Pavis, the theorist of postmodernism, remarks that dramaturgs and directors have resisted this notion:

Alain Girault has noted that ‘the dusting operation implies an idealist philosophical notion of the permanence of man. “Dusting” is finally “dehistoricizing”, denying history (reducing it to surface reflection, to “dust”).’ Refusing to ‘dust off involves an assumption of historical displacement, shocking the audience with the consciousness of a formal separation which corresponds to a separation of distinct world views, Brecht notes that, after the mise en scene of Schiller’s Robbers, Piscator told him that ‘he had looked for what would make people remark on leaving the theatre that 150 years were no small matter.’

Or Antoine Vitez:

Either one leaves the dust and continues as before – the Comedie Francaise has been gathering layers of dust for a long time and masking the dust with a new layer of wax – or one can try something else. One can do more than simply remove the dust; one can alter the object itself. A vase that has been miraculously preserved can always be useful. A play is quite different. The object itself is fundamentally transformed, even if the text remains completely intact. We can no longer read it in the same way as those readers for whom it was written. What we read is a kind of memory; this consists of making distorted elements reappear to our present life – in fact, the correspondence between individual and social body.

Pavis again:

What appears to be important in the reading of the classical text is the ability to historicize the dust, instead of ignoring it or covering it up. This practice is quite close to translation, which provides a version of the source text in the language of the new reader, who then has a choice: between a translation-adaptation that, in order to avoid slavishly copying the text to be translated, transposes the text into its new cultural context; and a more literal translation that, at the risk of a feeling of strangeness and idiomatic shortcomings, preserves something of the rhetoric and world view of the source language. Like translation, reading the classics is always accompanied by a loss of meaning, or rather by the destruction of whole facets of signification.

A classical text contains two kinds of ambiguity or indeterminacy: those programmed into the work, the kind that brings complexity to it, and those that arise out of the unforseeable modifications in the circumstances of reception: hints about class and status and morality that don’t work anymore, because we live in a different time. The first ought to be preserved, the second not so much. Finally, Pavis gives a simple rule of thumb to interpretation:

If the mise en scene can, in a new concretization of the text, suggest new zones of intederminacy, organize possible trajectories of meaning between them, the classical dramatic text may recapture the glow tarnished by the passage of time and by banal interpretations. This phenomenon of recycling grants the classical text a perennial life by founding this life, not on permanent and unchanging significance, but on change and adaptation.

I hope this has explained both the crucial role that interpretation plays in the theatre, and why I was so keen to see The Wild Duck as an interpretation of a text.

However, Stone brushes all of this aside, and reads Ibsen as the writer of great family potboilers. His admiration of Ibsen is ex tempore, so to speak: he sees in them the themes of our time, structured by Ibsen’s dramaturgical skill into crafty stories, that have a vitality and finesse of structure that is still current today, and only need to be rescued from their 19th-century language and setting, and lo and behold, we have a contemporary play. Dusting, in other words. Vigorous dusting.

But herein lies the problem: Stone’s interpretations of Ibsen (as well as of Chekov) works have been increasingly faithful to the point of literalness (and somewhat reminiscent of the works of Thomas Ostermeier at Berlin’s Schaubuehne). This approach culminates in The Wild Duck, which has had a more thorough dusting than any Stone production so far. The play has been modernised; specifically, Australianized.

Herein lies the first problem with this production: in order to achieve the contemporary-Australianization of The Wild Duck, Stone has simply re-written the entire thing. It has not been lovingly restored, not even just bleached of every reference to Europe and the 19th-century – it has become a contemporary Australian play following the same general story line.

From five acts, it has been condensed into less than 90 minutes. New scenes have been added, with no correlation to the original. Characters have changed significantly. A great deal of characterization relies on entirely contemporary-Australian circumstances: the character of Hedvig is the typical product of the Australian private school system, and her parents quite concerned about paying for it. That kind of thing. The only thing intact is the rough outline of the story itself.

Stone has always done that, every one of his productions was a thorough re-writing, but The Wild Duck shows the crucial influence of Chris Ryan, who first collaborated with Stone as a co-writer on Thyestes. Where Stone’s work simply streamlined the dialogue and modernised the language (in an almost imperceptible way), both Stone/Ryan adaptations feature entire new scenes, of a Tarantinoesque quality: not just modern but pop-cultural, not just moving the plot along more swiftly but replacing filler scenes with specifically Australian, vernacular, urban boy banter. But Thyestes was methodical: every scene of the play was replaced by a quiet moment before or after the actual event. This was a courageous decision, it asked the audience to work for the meaning, and trusted them to do so. The Wild Duck is less systematic: most of the scenes are there, but many (especially in the second half) are purely made up. Many of the new scenes are purely expositional, explaining things that remained unsaid in Ibsen’s work: the specifics of the Ekdahl family ruin, Gregers Werle’s love life, and a post scriptum to the play. These are Stone/Ryan flights of fancy, redundant, chief vehicles by which this Wild Duck distances itself from Ibsen, and, also, inelegant.

This tactic of modernization by re-writing is really quite brutal. It purges Ibsen of everything but plot. More than an update, it is recontextualised and thoroughly made-over to comply with contemporary sensibility. It is basically a remake, of the kind practiced by Hollywood. As a strategy, it is not at all subtle, and it simply cannot be called interpretation. Nothing has been left to interpret. No evidence has remained of any interaction between a director and a text. The director has not tackled the text from any angle, because he has not had to. He has literally written himself out of having to deal with someone else’s work. The potentially difficult, unruly, resistant text, a text requiring directorial work and patience and research, has been replaced with its own pliable, submissive clone. I have previously suggested that Stone’s problems with Baal stem out of this practice of not actually reading the dramatic text, but re-writing it to suit his directorial vision, and I think, based on The Wild Duck, that it was a correct observation.

To interpret a text by making your entirely own version of it is not automatic theatrical anathema; of course not. However, the second and chief problem with this Wild Duck is that it does not simply translate the text into a contemporary Australian play, it reduces the original by doing so. Every interpretation makes choices of focus, but each good one broadens or deepens or re-focuses our view, and enriches our experience of the original in some way. This one doesn’t: it does not broaden or deepen or strengthen Ibsen in any way. It doesn’t reduce the play simply in length, number of characters, lines of dialogue. It reduces it thematically, in scope. It makes The Wild Duck narrower and shallower.

Stone/Ryan simplify or altogether remove a great deal of Ibsen’s text and subtext: the sociological complexity (key force in all Ibsen’s work); almost everything to do with class and money. Characters are simplified, and with it their relationships: Gregers Werle’s blind belief that relationships must be based on honesty is excised, berieving of motivation the one character moving the plot. In Ibsen’s play, Hjalmar Ekdahl is a tragic anti-hero whose weakness of character only gradually becomes apparent: intellectual vanity, self-aggrandisement combined with self-pity, depressive tendencies. He is quite similar to April and Frank Wheeler from Richard Yates’s Revolutionary Road, people who need to be tragic, not small failures, if they cannot be great successes. Ibsen’s Gina Ekdahl treats her husband’s fury at her sort-of infidelity with an ironic, tongue-in-cheek deference, which is simply beautiful to read. Stone’s couple is largely undefined, fairly nondescript bar their Australianness. The allegorical comparison of Hjalmar’s beautiful melancholy to the defeatist behaviour of wild ducks is likewise lost.

Keith Gallasch has analysed the relationship of this dramatic text to Ibsen’s Duck in great detail already, in Real Time. I am not going to do the same work once over, so please read his analysis if you are not convinced by my short summary. I agree with Gallasch’s meticulously argued conclusion: the new play is thinner in concept, weaker. Ibsen wrote a play about the weakness of human character, about its inability to face the truth, and about the way we rely on telling ourselves lies about who we are in order to get through life. Stone and Ryan have written a play about divorce.

‘Remake’ is not the right word for this sort of appropriation, but it is closer and more correct than ‘interpretation’. Of interpretation, I saw very little. The play has been greatly simplified in order to match its time and place, and Simon Stone’s entire interpretive guiding logic seems to be modernization; making it relevant again (re-relevantisation?). Unfortunately, that is just not enough. No theatrical interpretation ever has tried to make its text anything other than relevant to its time and place: modernization cannot be the sole aim of an interpretation. That is very much confusing the bathwater for the baby.

And then, Stone achieves the modernization by removing a great deal of nuance and depth from Ibsen, most of its larger, philosophical undercurrent – effectively emphasising the melodrama. And he does it by adopting the easiest approach possible: total rewrite.

And finally the Chekhovian gun shoots: because Ibsen became the guiding spirit of so much contemporary English-language drama, with his era-unravelling dinner parties, this new text, by Stone and Ryan, becomes just another contemporary Australian play about how divorce damages children, not at all different in form from anything that might have been written afresh in 2011. Does it work? Well, people have enjoyed it across Sydney and Melbourne. It has the triple bonus of being an easily digestible contemporary play, of being well-written, funny and moving, and of somehow being a 19th-century classic at the same time, making one’s enjoyment of it vested with self-interest and perceived virtue. It shows us ourselves in full minute detail, and pulls us apart in a fine plot. This is why I prefaced this review by noting that there is nothing wrong with anyone enjoying this production: it is very consciously designed to be enjoyed, and it is skillfully executed to do so.

However.

However, there is more to theatre than just craft. There is interpretive and artistic ethics. There is no method to this interpretation, no discernible philosophy, no systematic dramaturgical approach, nothing but the imperative of ‘making it relevant’. It makes us see ourselves in Ibsen, but at the expense of a great deal of complexity in Ibsen. It does not reveal anything new, hidden in Ibsen’s work. It does not find contemporary relevance in Ibsen – it finds Ibsen in a contemporary story. It says: Ibsen is like us. It does not say: we are like Ibsen. It does not make one understand Ibsen better.

(And I suspect it does not make one understand Australia better either, because, however well translated, it is still a story from another time and place. The plot is still gripping, but teenage suicides and bastard children, family secrets and loss of bourgeois face are not themes of our day and time.)

And as interpretation, it fails. I thought long and hard about the equivalent sort of move I could draw a parallel. It is not quite pastiche, and it is not parody either. It is a simplifying analogy, rather, driven by a certain kind of evangelical, popularising impulse (and here the second Chekhovian gun goes off!). It is this:

But it is also, in another way, this:

Both are valid things to do, but can you see my point? Neither image offers an interesting new interpretation of Christianity, even of the tradition of visual interpretation of Mary and baby Jesus, per se. To do that, we need to go at least to Leonardo da Vinci. Or Wim Delvoye.

None of this may be perceptible to a person unfamiliar with Ibsen’s Duck. They might simply enjoy the story, and their own enjoyment of it. Since there is a great dearth of well-made stories about contemporary Australia, The Wild Duck, like The Slap, provides a necessary mirror to our society, however distorting, however illusory. And it seems quite clear that this production has been designed with that kind of audience member in mind, just like those African, evangelical Jesuses.

However, a production that simplifies in order to get the audience on its side is a production that patronises its audience. To an informed audience member, it says nothing new, nor interesting, about Ibsen, Norway, or the world. In Pavisian terms, no new zones of indeterminacy have been suggested. The work has been overexplained, simplified, narrowed, betrayed beyond all requirements of translation.

It remains competently made theatre, and one that achieves what it sets to achieve: turn Ibsen’s Wild Duck into a contemporary Australian play. However, like with Thomas Ostermeier, I do not see any validity or value in this approach. In order to give it any more credit, I need to be convinced that Slapifying Ibsen is a worthwhile aim in the first place.

Feb 08 2012
17 Comments
australia, Belvoir, Bertolt Brecht, criticism, essays, formal inquiry, Malthouse, Sydney Theatre Company, theatre

Ah, but anyone can shit on a play…

January/February are somewhat dead theatre time in Victoria, I’ve been plenty busy with other art forms, and I find Twitter a little distressing, so I had missed the fact of a new (beautifully designed) Australian general-interest publication, The Global Mail, having an inaugural arts feature pertaining to theatre bloggers.

Or rather, using theatre blogging as a pretext to profile one Jane Simmons, who voiced her opinions on theatre (anonymously until The Global Mail report) on a blog titled, indicatively, Shit On Your Play.

Carl Nilsson Polias alerted me to the fact that I was name-checked in the article, and I read with great interest the profile, the quotes from Ms Simmons’ blog, and then the blog itself. And I suppose what I read made me want to respond.

It is unusual for the Australian press to report positively on blogs – theatre blogs in particular; despite the global opinion generally being positive (what with The Guardian jumping on board with their Theatre Blog years ago, and the emergence of authoritative sources of theatre criticism such as Nachtkritik.de), Australian media are still presenting them roughly with a combination of bored yawn (‘oh dear, everyone is a critic now’) and outright hostility towards the un-edited, un-professional, un-paid criticism uncloaked in the authority of a general-interest publication. The exception to that, of course, have been the many (many, many) articles published by Alison Croggon (of the widely read Theatre Notes, for my overseas readers), articulating the relative strengths of theatre blogs, and the hole they plug in the relatively poor coverage in the mainstream media.

For those reasons, it was interesting to read The Global Mail article, which was a rare case of a non-hostile write-up. But. Oh but. To start, it is simply incorrect to present Jane Simmons as model blogger (as Alison C notes in her response to the article:

blogging is much more interesting, diverse, porous (and long-lived) than is represented here. [...] It seems like an enormous missed opportunity to explore the pros and cons, the challenges and problems, of current blogging and critical culture.

But Jane Simmons’ is such a singularly poor model of theatre blogging that profiling Shit On Your Play (in eerily positive terms) is an enormous disservice to everyone: Simmons herself, theatre blogging, Australian theatre, Australian media, the uncritical Stephen Crittenden, and The Global Mail itself.

At least two bloggers have already and publically taken offence at being packed into the same basket: Alison C and Augusta Supple, who wrote in her blog:

I’m not going to shit on anyone or their play or their blog. I don’t think that’s cool. I don’t think that’s useful. But I will ask those who delight in the style of writing that empowers the anonymous and aggressive – if this is the tone and style of the artistic conversations we should be having? Is this the best we can do for each other?

What to say about Jane Simmons, except that she has basically been a troll with a blog? She has been known for writing in the style of the following (her review of the Malthouse/STC co-production of Baal:

Stone calls this play a tragedy- “by presenting humanity in extremis, tragedy shows us the extents of our psychological potential…Baal is the nightmare catharsis of the anti-social instinct”. Ah…sorry, what was that? Do you mean, by presenting as many cocks, cans, titties and a man in women’s undies, we will expose the deepest darkest parts of ourselves and show the world how terrible to succumb to this extreme? I struggled to think the cast cared, let alone me. I left the theatre more concerned about what to have for dinner than what message the play might have tried to imbibe.

Or, from her review of STC’s production of Gross und Klein:

German surrealist literature….well, perhaps all German literature actually, can often be categorised as reflecting a people who understand that everything turns to shit. This being the case, Gross und Klein fulfilled its objective. By the end not even the enticement of hearing the actors Q & A or catching another glimpse of Kevin Spacey in the audience was enough to make me want to stay.

There is so little in this kind of review that could be of any value to anyone: to the audience, to the artist, to the production company, to the reader. It is largely opinion without analysis, plus critique ad personam, often amounting to the following argumentative logic: ‘this play sucked because the director is stupid, and so 5 minutes in I wanted to go home and do my laundry instead‘.

There is no analysis of what went wrong or how – no real meat to her argument, anything to debate with, anything to use as development of one’s own experience of the work, very little new information about what the work could or should have been. Compare Augusta’s review of Baal:

The adaption itself seemed to be obsessed with the sound of the language – declamatory and forced and overt – and therefore clumsy. The delivery seemed equally as staccato, stylized and forced. I found the style itself alienating (harking back to Brecht’s ideas within Epic Theatre – which is interesting since I don’t think he’d yet developed that idea when he wrote BAAL – so to overlay that directorial style on this texts seems somewhat anachronistic). I found the characters to be utterly basic and one dimensional – with little to no sub-textual level and therefore without any major transformation or change. And I wasn’t sure what I was being asked to feel. Was I to feel sorry for Baal? Or his friends? Or the women? I felt was disconnected from them all. I also felt like it was all a fore-gone conclusion. They brought about their own demise – but did I care? Nope.

And so I asked myself, “why don’t I care?”

Is this an example of my own numbness? Perhaps. But I guess it came back to the fact that I feel like that world – where desire is soley manifested in the act of sex, and sex is confused for love, and stimulation is synthetic and drug-induced – is so far away from my life, reality/experience that I had no connection to it; at all. I watch on as the embarrassing pink-fleshed animals of my species destroy each other and I think – well… I’ve learnt nothing – this is what I assumed of this world and it follows what I believe – ego is ugly, fame is fickle, fame creates a false sense of power, entitlement and immortality, having no values hurts. So I was vindicated, but not transformed.

Or, say, my own:

Stone has made his name by essentially re-writing, then directing, the works of that same previous generation – and the generation Brecht was particularly defining himself in opposition to. [...] And Stone has directed them aptly Bergmanesquely: in chiaroscuro, with long shadows, carving hints and glimpses of universal significance out of meticulous portrayal of the mundane. [...]

Whereas a scene from Ibsen is a meticulous moment of mundane, through which one may glimpse a universal significance, Brecht’s writing is blunt, sketchy, showing only the essential point of the scene. The role of the spectator is then to relate this sketch to an everyday moment, to anchor it in reality (in this aspect Brecht’s writing functions as satire).

So. Ibsen: particular hinting at the universal. Brecht: universal hinting at the particular.

I don’t think it’s easier to direct the former than the latter kind, but much of this production nonetheless looked like Stone wasn’t sure what particular he was hinting at.

Jane Simmons and The Global Mail make a big deal out of other critics being overly supportive of bad theatre, but I think this is a claim incorrectly made on purpose, to mask the lack of substance of Jane Simmons’ reviews. Many of us didn’t like Baal. Most of us went through the effort of analysing why, what went wrong. That is hard work, harder, in any case, than sniping at male nudity and shrugging the whole enterprise off. What Jane Simmons tells you, in most cases, is that she liked or didn’t like a play; or that it worked or didn’t. That’s all you get: an appraisal, a vote. The review could have been replaced with a number: 4/10, sit down.

A commenter on Theatre Notes related that to Simmons’ role as drama teacher:

It seems to me that Jane speaks like many a drama teacher in her sharp criticisms. Anyone who has been in an acting school or class has probably been told that what they’re doing is shit at one point or another. I’ve read articles about awesome actors who came in for heavy criticism from their teachers at drama school, so it’s no surprise that this particular drama teacher has a ready supply of caustic things to say, it’s just that she’s now giving the drama teacher treatment to everyone, not just her students.

But, again – I have myself participated in numerous crits, on both sides. Only a bad crit is about character assassination. The purpose of the crit is to interrogate the artist (budding) on the intentions and goals of their work, their method and process, and then judge the work on having or not achieved those goals – and do it in a way that can send the (budding) artist off with a plan to fix the flaws. (See wonderful American reality TV series Work of Art for a much better example of what a crit consists of.) To disagree with the artist’s entire premise, aesthetics and goals is not what you are there for; you are there to be a sort of art doctor.

The non-constructive review has its place in this world, too. Every so often one sees a performance whose flaws would take too long to list – here we have the hatchet job, as exemplified by Dale Peck in literary criticism. However, if it not going to be a constructive lament of sorts, if it is going to be heartless, a negative review must, at the very least, be a good read.

Compare any of the above Simmons to Kenneth Tynan lamenting (completely unconstructively) the dearth of commercially successful theatre in England (The Lost Art of Bad Drama, 1955):

One begins to suspect that the English have lost the art of writing a bad successful play. Perhaps some sort of competition should be organized: the rules, after all, are simple enough. At no point may the plot or characters make more than superficial contact with reality. Characters earning less than £1,000 a year should be restricted to small parts or exaggerated into types so patently farcical that no member of the audience could possibly identify himself with such absurd esurience… Irony is confined to having an irate male character shout: ‘I am perfectly calm!’… Apart from hysterical adolescents, nobody may weep; apart from triumphant protagonists, nobody may laugh; anyone, needless to say, may smile…. Women who help themselves unasked to cigarettes must be either frantic careerists or lustful opportunists. The latter should declare themselves by running the palm of one hand up their victim’s lapel and saying, when it reaches the neck: ‘Let’s face it, Arthur, you’re not exactly indifferent to me.’

Or, say, David Foster Wallace’s merciless review of John Updike’s Toward the End of Time:

It is, of the total 25 Updike books I’ve read, far and away the worst, a novel so mind-bendingly clunky and self-indulgent that it’s hard to believe the author let it be published in this kind of shape.

I’m afraid the preceding sentence is this review’s upshot, and most of the balance here will consist of presenting evidence/ justification for such a disrespectful assessment. First, though, if I may poke the critical head into the frame for just one moment, I’d like to offer assurances that your reviewer is not one of these spleen-venting, spittle-spattering Updike-haters one encounters among literary readers under 40. The fact is that I am probably classifiable as one of very few actual sub-40 Updike fans . [...]

Most of the literary readers I know personally are under 40, and a fair number are female, and none of them are big admirers of the postwar [Great Male Narcissists]. But it’s Mr. Updike in particular they seem to hate. And not merely his books, for some reason-mention the poor man himself and you have to jump back:

“Just a penis with a thesaurus.”

“Has the son of a bitch ever had one unpublished thought?”

“Makes misogyny seem literary the same way Limbaugh makes fascism seem funny.”

These reviews make editors money and increase literacy rates across countries because they are fun to read, witty, well-observed and still informative, not merely because spleens are vented. When spleens are merely vented, it is called ‘ranting’. And when they are vented anonymously, as is Shit On Your Play, without even presenting a coherent on-line identity, then we call it ‘trolling’.

Writing witty unfriendly things about John Updike’s latest novel, or Simon Stone’s direction of Baal, and signing it with one’s own name and surname, carries the risk that the same John Updike or Simon Stone might bump into you at a magazine office, theatre foyer, dinner party, or on the street, and want to discuss your work the way you discussed theirs. This is not pleasant, hey – which is why using one’s name and surname is the best and quickest way to get a critic to build sound and researched arguments.

Jane Simmons’ reviews often conceal, rather than articulate, her knowledge of drama – her discussion of Brecht in the review of Baal makes sense to me, but would not inform anyone else. Her own taste constantly gets in the way of good analysis: she dismisses the entire German dramatic practice (its writing, its direction, and its dramaturgy) without batting an eyelid. Her critical manner is appalling, and I would be worried if she extended it to her teaching practice.

Finally, her snide and anonymous comments, devoid of articulated argument or charm, are quite the opposite of unusual: the theatrical social world of every country I know is lubricated with unfounded, slight, ad hominem, often vicious, informal and unsigned commentary behind people’s backs.

This approach is basically anti-intellectual: it amounts to yelling at people who disagree with you, and attempts to disqualify them from the argument, rather than arguing anything out. It turns everything personal too soon. It shuts debate, rather than feeding it. It makes participants give up, and either ignore a discussion held at such low level, or attempt to be bland and even-sided to the point of terrible boredom, just to bring the discussion back on some civilised track. It is completely and typically Australian in all of these aspects.

It is so tiring to see an Australian general-interest magazine focus on the arts, once again, only to construe a mini-culture war: overly polite, inner-city, Europhiliac, bleeding-heart critics and theatre establishment versus rugged individualists and suburban working families, with their no-bullshit, tell-it-how-it-is attitude. It does not need to be like this. I have just returned from Hobart, a small city which has embraced its temple to avant-garde art, MONA, with unreserved curiosity and delight. MONA, in turn, has embraced its locale to an astonishing degree. Being there, watching children wander through MONA, and having the local hair-dresser eager to discuss the influence of religious ethos on Wim Delvoye, felt very much like being in Europe, a place similarly relaxed about the role of art in everyday life.

But alliance-building takes time, and a certain astuteness, in a country ravaged by culture wars, and I don’t see J.S. exactly leading the way. The only people who will really enjoy J.S.’s dismissive reviews are those who either cannot get to the reviewed shows (either because of geography or finances) and want to feel they are not missing anything, those who have made a conscious decision not to go and want their views validated, and those for whom theatre-in-Australia is something to opt out of as an act of identity definition. (Look at the comments.) It will not foster an audience, the way I started going to theatre in Melbourne only once I felt I could trust Theatre Notes to guide me. It will not foster a discussion, not beyond the outraged blip that is has caused already. Now that J.S. has been named and profiled, her reviews might acquire a degree of accountability, and she might grow into a constructive force yet. But, as of today, nothing constructive has yet come out of her shitting on people’s plays.

Feb 06 2012
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2010, dance, Eurokaz, Les Ballets C de la B, middlebrow, needcompany, performance, published, RealTime, reviews, theatre, third-millenium malaise

The pre-cognitive alternative (reviewed: Les Ballets C de la B’s Out of Context – For Pina; Needcompany’s The Ballad of Ricky and Ronny)

Out of Context—For Pina, Les Ballets C de la B. Photo: Chris Van der Burght.

IT IS PERHAPS IRONIC, AND PERHAPS TRAGIC, 20 YEARS INTO A POST-IDEOLOGICAL ERA, IN WHICH CHOICE-LED CONSUMERISM HAS REMAINED THE SOLE SURVIVING ETHOS, THAT ART IS INCREASINGLY PREOCCUPIED WITH THE QUESTION OF THE STANDARDISATION OF HUMAN EXPERIENCE. WHAT SHOULD HAVE DISAPPEARED WITH THE SOVIET UNION SEEMS, ON THE CONTRARY, ALL-PERVASIVE.

From architect Rem Koolhaas’ notion of the “generic city” to theorist Fredric Jameson’s understanding of how postmodernity empties time of causal progression, analysis across disciplines returns to the idea that all this variation of screen sizes and skirt lengths is just a buzzing distraction from the standardisation of life on all levels, from feelings to social interaction, psychology to geography, to which There Is No Alternative.

Nothing exemplifies this buzzing vacuum better than the flying circus of internationally touring theatre, in which winning formulae and fashionable styles are often tediously replicated across languages and bodies, and all apparent cultural diversity collapses into trendy homogeneity. One such flying circus, Needcompany, is currently touring Europe with a production that interrogates precisely what happens to the human soul in this generic society.

The Ballad of Ricky and Ronny, a collaboration with Anna Sophia Bonnema and Hans Petter Dahl, is the first in a planned trilogy of pop-operas about a disaffected middle-class couple. It is sung entirely in international English, the thin, bland second language of most of the contemporary world, combining the tinniness of Nico and the verbal rhythms of Patti Smith with the drowsy beats of Flaming Lips. Ricky and Ronny once experienced love, idealism, the 1960s. Now, they cannot put a finger on the cause of their despair, as they lack any serious grievance. Instead, they milk their bloodless English, collected from Hollywood movies and pop music, for tired invectives and sentimental clichés. They try to muster stage provocation with bondage-wear and sexual experimentation. And yet they linger on stage in impeccable Euro-clothes, studiously avoiding physical contact, while their unnameable despair coalesces into a phantasm child, an hallucination made out of pink snow and yellow sperm, and they eventually commit a meaningless suicide. To underline just how little pathos The Ballad intends to create, an immaculate French maid sits upstage right throughout the performance, leisurely fiddling with the tech.

The opera is a structural, Zizekian tragedy: Ricky and Ronny are defeated by monster consumerism which satisfies desires before they can even fully form, leaving them in a state of voiceless agitation, or what cultural commentator Mark Fisher would call ‘depressive hedonia.’ Thematically, the work sits in the conventional territory of dramatising cocooning middle-class despair without a cause. Its memory of love that used to redeem draws unlikely associations with Sarah Kane, whose despair is also moored in the deepest belief in love. However, Ricky and Ronny’s anxiety has no shelter throughout the performance, as the work refuses to believe in the metaphorical monsters its protagonists build to outsource their existential angst, much less defeat them in order to bring about any happy ending.

The Ballad of Ricky and Ronny, Needcompany. Photo: Maarten Vanden Abeele.

The problems are threefold: eliminating the poetic aspects in the figuration of the bourgeois ennui does not, by itself, reveal its socio-political structure; The Ballad is no more penetrating a social critique than a conventional zombie flick. Secondly, made entirely out of generic elements, it is one of the most tedious performances I have ever seen, so commonplace through and through that it tends towards invisibility. Finally, there is an annoying solipsism at the heart of a performance that so deeply represents and replicates the very condition it denounces: it appears to have frustrated every Eastern European audience it has encountered, including the one that saw it with me at Eurokaz festival in Croatia. While it must be said that the immaculate staging and the direction of movement build the formal perfection of the piece, I have rarely been so pleased to see an audience rebel against understanding an artwork. For it means that tragic standardisation is not a universal condition, despite all the global English employed to construct the argument.

A new work by another Belgian company, Les Ballets C de la B’s Out of Context — For Pina, approaches the matter from a radically different angle. Alain Platel’s company is among Europe’s most respected, and the new work was showing at Sadler’s Wells for only two nights before rushing back to the festival circuit (it was scheduled at Avignon later in the season). The UK critics were rather sceptical towards a company that meshes vernacular movement with high aspirations (‘fun’ and ‘skill,’ two terms dear to British dance, are quietly sidelined in Platel’s vocabulary), but Out of Context has, in other places, been hailed as their best work yet.

The movement, woven out of the unconscious tics, spasms, hysterical and involuntary gestures that Platel has encountered in his prior work as an orthopedagogue includes pouting, scratching, over-the-top disco dancing, parodic mime and is consciously poor in style, making almost no references to any ‘serious’ dance tradition. Platel has refused to call himself a choreographer; Out of Context is an exquisite choreography nonetheless. Unlike his previous works, it is played on an empty stage, to no programmatic score. Bookmarked by nine dancers entering from the stalls, undressing to their underwear, then dressing and leaving again at the end of the show, it has three clear phases: initial rituals of mating and acquainting with animal sounds in the background evolves into the second phase, in which lines of pop music are thrown around together with exuberant dancing until, in the elegiac third part, the dancers retreat into singularity again. The piece defies description by virtue of sheer over-accumulation: 90 minutes of startlingly original movement with virtually no repetition, on nine different physiques that, even when amassed into synchronicity, preserve individual differences. (The piece is dedicated to Pina Bausch, in recognition of the foundational importance of her psychologically driven strategies for European dance.) Not having any narrative frame allows the audience to experience this decontextualised mass of movement on the level of affect, not cognition, free-associating stage images to deep memories. The result is emotionally penetrating and deliriously enjoyable.

Whereas The Ballad of Ricky and Ronny is a work so deeply illustrative of the nihilistic element within consumer capitalism that it irons itself into a completely inexpressive pancake, Out of Context locks itself within the last bastion of human expression that has escaped the Fordism of soul: the pre-cognitive, the involuntary, the spastic. We could see an eternal, unwinnable race at work, in which ever-shrinking chunks of life are accessed, broken down, conquered and reproduced—perhaps Platel is simply mapping previously inaccessible sides of the human experience. But it is also good, in some fundamental way, to experience a performance that leaves the audience elated rather than crushed.

Needcompany/MaisonDahlBonnema, The Ballad of Ricky and Ronny, authors, performers Anna Sophia Bonnema, Hans Petter Dahl, libretto Bonnema, music Dahl, costume, lighting MaisonDahlBonnema; Eurokaz Festival, Zagreb, June 23-24; Out of Context—For Pina, Les Ballets C de la B, concept, direction Alain Platel, dramaturgy Hildegard De Vuyst, danced & created by Elie Tass, Emile Josse, Hyo Seung Ye, Kaori Ito, Mathieu Desseigne Pavel, Melanie Lomoff, Romeu Runa, Rosalba Torres Guerrero, Ross McCormack; Sadler’s Wells, London, June 17,18

First published in RealTime, issue #98, Aug-Sept 2010, pg. 25.

Feb 06 2012
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2010, audience, ethics, festivals, formal inquiry, performance, published, RealTime, reviews, Rimini Protokoll, theatre, VISUAL ARTS

shopping for experience (reviewed: a whole bunch of relational/immersive/participatory theatre, including London’s LIFT and BAC’s One-on-One Festival; Rimini Protokoll, Dries Verhoeven)

Life Streaming, Dries Verhoeven. Photo: Maarten van Haaff.

IMMERSIVE, RELATIONAL, PARTICIPATORY, SITE-SPECIFIC… WHATEVER TERM YOU PREFER (AND I PREFER ‘RELATIONAL’, AS THIS IS PRIMARILY A THEATRE OF SOCIAL AND SPATIAL RELATIONS), THIS FORM DOMINATED THE LONDON SUMMER OF 2010. BATTERSEA ARTS CENTRE (BAC) PRESENTED AN ENTIRE FESTIVAL OF ONE-ON-ONE WORKS, WITH OVER THIRTY ONE-MAN-(OR WOMAN)-SHOWS CRAMMED INTO THE OLD BATTERSEA TOWN HALL IN SOUTH LONDON. THE MORE CENTRALLY LOCATED LIFT (LONDON INTERNATIONAL FESTIVAL OF THEATRE) DEDICATED THE LION’S SHARE OF ITS PROGRAM TO EVENTS THAT COULD JUST AS EASILY HAVE BEEN TERMED MASS GAMING, COLLECTIVE SKYPING OR SCAVENGER HUNTS.

At the Barbican, during the same period, You Me Bum Bum Train entered history as their fastest-selling show ever: part theatre, part Thank God You’re Here, it turned each audience member into the protagonist, made to improvise their way through a series of dramatic situations in front of the supporting cast of 200. With so much emphasis on you, the spectator, forgive me if the rest of this article privileges the second-person singular.

one-on-one festival


An immersive event in its own right, One-On-One Festival was possibly its own greatest achievement. The least one could sign up for was a marvellously organised afternoon of mingling through a building crammed with secret one-man wonders, appointment card in hand. The atmosphere was surprisingly welcoming, even festive: performers and spectators crossing paths in the same courtyard and café, recommendations exchanged, friendships commenced, queues spontaneously forming outside the rooms with hidden gems on the strength of on-the-spot word of mouth. Repeatedly diving into a 2-or-3-minute intensely collaborative performance, being in turns swung and shaken, kissed and sung to, frightened or intellectually challenged, by the end of the day one had no personal boundaries left to speak of.

Despite being cumulatively great, One-On-One also demonstrated how quickly an emergent genre can settle on a limited range of solutions. One kind seemed tailored to break through fears of intimacy: Abigail Conway’s On Dancefloors invites you to dance; Emma Benson sings a song with you in Me You Now. Most radically, Adrian Howells gives you a bath in The Pleasure of Being: Washing, Feeding, Holding, while Ansuman Biswas’s more open-ended 2 FREE offers the possibility of engaging with a naked, blindfolded man. However trivial they may sound conceptually, these were some of the most powerful performances in the festival, spoken about in hushed, almost spiritual tones. You found yourself entering these rooms with the same mixture of compulsion and terror with which you might climb into a roller-coaster (and they certainly act as a kind of psycho-social one, including the lag with which you process the experience afterwards). But if theatre is ever genuinely life-changing, it is in the strangely liberating afterglow that follows consensual nudity.

Another, quieter type of performance centred on material reality, and the tactile dimension of the experience generated, not so much inter-personal intimacy as greater understanding of how the world works. Barnaby Stone’s A Little Bit of a Beautiful Thing is a story of a wooden beam, a finely polished slice of which you will receive at the end. In Ray Lee’s Electric, your body becomes a conductor. Another focused on creating a first-person narrative, employing cascades of clever sensory illusions: for the 10 minutes of Just For a Moment, by Three Blind Mice, you have a drink at a pub, lie on the beach, dance Macarena in the world’s most terrible discotheque, witness a fight and have to be walked out of the pub at the end of the night, despite being blindfolded in a single room. Stan’s Café use mirrors, projection, costumes and clever framing to generate a 240-second film noir before your very eyes, with you as the chief villain, in It’s Your Film. While these works were longer, more carefully shaped and satisfied some of that need for dramatic spectacle that drives people into theatres on perfectly lovely summer days, their beauty again seemed to derive chiefly from the promise of intimacy, of being made-to-measure and the soporific pleasures of being touched, rather than from well-executed tricks.

The most accomplished works brought together the cerebral and the felt, offering an encounter while questioning its limitations. Sarah Johns’ Below plays with your perceptions: dragged into a dark room, her performance catches you before you can make sense of where you are. Facing a mirror and a singing girl, your focus shifts abruptly from one detail to another, resulting in a series of mesmerising, well-defined impressions, as if in a film. And of course, towering above the rest, is Ontroerend Goed’s trilogy of brief, but flawless works that boldly question the gullibility of the audience.

As Peggy Phelan writes, theatre has always been a meeting place, always offering the promise of a communion, an exchange—even across the proscenium arch. The relationship between audience and performer is, in her words, “the always already unequal encounter [that] nonetheless summons the hope of reciprocity and equality” (Unmarked: The Politics of Performance, Routledge, 1993). Relational performance is the inevitable end-product of this quest. Yet in it, intimacy emerges not only as a tool and a goal, but as a major concern: can we have it, how, by what means and why do we desire it in the first place? A number of works at BAC traded on the false promise of quick intimacy, and most fell short: after all, the obvious difficulties of building a rapport with the actor in five tightly scripted minutes cannot be overcome just by holding hands. Ontroerend Goed’s Smile Off Your Face, Internal and A Game of You capitalise on this disingenuousness. Internal, in particular, set up as a speed-dating session followed by a sweetly cruel group debrief, builds the illusion of a budding attraction only to break your heart (comparing notes with other viewers is soul-crushing). Yet, for all its oversharing, Internal provides a dose of needed realism in a universe made of caresses. It stands as a reminder that there is no such thing as conveyor-belt romance, no intimacy on a mass scale, and that audiences often give their hearts away too easily.

Best Before, Rimini Protokoll. Photo courtesy: the artists.

lift 2010

The polar opposite of the high-concept One-On-One, LIFT 2010 was a festival with an identity crisis. Rubbing shoulders were weekend events for kids, formalist community theatre and the occasional think piece. Yet here, too, the most interesting works were from the relational family.

Rimini Protokoll’s Best Before is a computer game for the whole audience. Represented by a globular multi-coloured blip, for two hours you live as a proud citizen of Bestland, making personal choices (tertiary education? children? buy a house? own a gun? try heroin?) and participating in collective decision-making (legalise drugs or guns? form an army? welcome immigrants? equal capabilities or a diverse population?). As the game progresses, you reap the fruits of some decisions and suffer the limitations of others, while your range of choices progressively narrows as you age. It is a game of consequences, but also of chance—some blips are randomly wiped out by epidemics and war while, ultimately, the whole population dies of old age. I found the end unexpectedly poignant, realising that there was no final payoff for all my prudent life choices (I had grown old with a big family and plenty of real estate). I suspect the experience varies according to your age and life experience, but also audience demographics.

Bookmarking the game is Rimini Protokoll’s trademark presence of non-performers, or rather ‘reality experts’—in this case, the game designer, a game tester, a lobbyist and a traffic flagger whom the other three would have passed by on their way to work. Their guidance and stories serve both to contextualise gaming in the real world, to relate Bestland to the political choices that Vancouver has faced, and to reconnect our personal choices to non-virtual consequences. The tension between the two aspects of Best Before, which never quite connect, is a productive one, even though I found the four Canadians’ lives infinitely more intriguing than my avatar’s cyber-shenanigans.

The real treat of the festival was Dries Verhoeven’s Life Streaming. The concept is minimal: in a makeshift internet café, each audience member conducts their own video chat with a young person in Sri Lanka. In the interstices of the poetic, but tightly orchestrated structure, filled with pre-prepared text and film and guiding us through such topics as the tsunami, loss and grief, my interlocutor and I manage to insert a real conversation about life, healthcare, the scent of the sea and lying in bed with total strangers. The work keeps the question of its own intent open, incorporating sensorial stimuli to create an exuberant experience not unlike a perfect holiday in South-East Asia, while at the same time allowing for an unusual degree of self-propelling interaction. Consequently, you come away with a real connection to a human being—if you so wish. Like Ontroerend Goed’s trilogy, Life Streaming raises big questions about art, reality and intimacy, but lets you choose your own answers.

to shop or not?


Elinor Fuchs argues that relational theatre is the last step in theatre’s commodification: after the ice-cream in the interval, now we can get ice-cream during the performance. Indeed she terms it “shopping theatre” (The Death of Character: Perspectives on Theater After Modernism, Indiana University Press, 1996) as it can so closely resemble a walk through a department store. It allows us to buy a reproduction of an experience that could not be bought otherwise. The physical set up, finally, is remarkably similar to a brothel—the room, the queue, the illusion of unique relationship.

However, I am not sure I entirely agree. At its worst, relational theatre combines the direst aspects of amusement parks and popular psychology, perhaps. But at its best, it incorporates the most conceptually interesting aspects of drama therapy, while allowing us to see our own experience through a critical prism. It highlights the qualities of everyday life, in all its mundane materiality, without distortion, in ways naturalistic theatre has consistently failed to achieve. Finally, the illusion of intimacy, of giving, which has existed for as long as theatre, can now be scrutinised in genuinely interesting ways. Relational theatre allows the exploration of the encounter between the artist and the spectator, an encounter that may be obviously staged, but is also more frank about its limitations. Once there are really only the two of you, the artifice becomes first disappointing, then bearable and finally, perhaps, genuinely empowering.

One-On-One Festival, Battersea Arts Centre (BAC), July 6-18, London; LIFT 2010: Rimini Protokoll, Best Before, created by Helgard Haug, Stefan Kaegi, dramaturg Tim Carlson, game design Brady Marks, video design Candelario Andrade, set design Andreas Kahre, sound design Stegan Smulovitz, with Duff Armour, Brady Marks, Ellen Schultz, Bob Williams/Arjan Dhupia, June 30-July 3, Institute of Contemporary Art (ICA); Life Streaming, director Dries Verhoeven, dramaturg Nienke Scholts, technical production Joffrey Kranen, Silk BV, National Theatre, June 23-July 4, LIFT Festival, London, June 23-July 13

First published in RealTime, issue #99, Oct-Nov 2010, pg. 10.

Feb 06 2012
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2010, dance, festivals, formal inquiry, Hiroaki Umeda, Malthouse, MIAF, performance, RealTime, reviews, theatre, VISUAL ARTS, visual dramaturgy

On the dyingness of things (reviewed: MIAF 2010: Stifters Dinge; David Chesworth’s Richter/Meinhof-Opera; Hotel Pro Forma’s Tomorrow, in a Year)

Stifters Dinge. Photo: Mario Del Curto.

WHAT IS A ROSE BEFORE IT HAS A NAME? WHAT IF OUR ABILITY TO INTERPRET AND INTERVENE, OUR AGENCY TO DECIDE WHAT THINGS ARE, RECEDED AND WE COULD SEE THE WORLD WITHOUT ADJECTIVES, UNMEDIATED BY INTENTION? TO WHAT EXTENT ARE WE MADE IN TURN BY THE WORLD WE THUS CREATE? AND WHAT IS THE AGENCY OF THINGS?

BETWEEN CARNIVAL OF MYSTERIES, HOTEL PRO FORMA, HEINER GOEBBELS’ STIFTERS DINGE, DAVID CHESWORTH’S RICHTER/MEINHOF-OPERA, SOME VAST GROUND ON THE TOPICS OF SYMBOLISATION AND REPRESENTATION WAS COVERED. IT SOUNDS PREPOSTEROUS; BUT THIS IS HOW.

richter/meinhof-opera

David Chesworth’s Richter/Meinhof-Opera was a highly anticipated take on the Red Army Faction’s Ulrike Meinhof. Announced as a 45-minute, pocket performance artwork (opera it wasn’t), it was an even shorter, quieter beast than expected. Tackling a potentially inexhaustible subject with an absolute minimalism of input and effect, it treads that usual fine line between the open-ended and the non-committal. It barely skims the complex story of Meinhof, respected journalist who joined a terrorist organisation, and whose simultaneous canonisation as left-wing martyr and demonization as Communist murderer still divides Germany. The only trace of the other members of the RAF is a record player, playing an Eric Clapton track, exactly as it did when Baader committed suicide in his prison cell. This is a rare instance in which the music goes beyond atmospheric soundscape; the other is a string duet, which mellifluously contrasts with the rest of the work, enhancing its thinness somehow. A few of Meinhof’s best-known quotations are projected onto ACCA’s shard-like walls, while centre-stage stands Gerhard Richter (Hugo Race), who famously painted RAF members’ death portraits in 1988, and was accused of mythologising terrorism.

The intended core of this work is the enormous disjuncture between direct action, advocated by Meinhof (often paraphrasing Brecht), and the indirectness and detachment of representational art, which often gives life to such ideas. The inability of our own cynical, ideologically unconvinced contemporary era to present the full spectrum of Meinhof’s time is another big theme. However, to say that Richter/Meinhof-Opera ‘explores’ them would be to give it excessive credit. Between Richter’s moody, detached canvases, the monochrome photos of the stylish Faction (which overwhelmingly comprised young women) and the occasional discursive duet (the libretto is a slim pastiche of quotations), the myth of RAF is presented as a matter of aestheticising or not; and the issue of direct action as a matter of professional ethics (to identify or not with one’s subject matter). Cold War politics lie forgotten, and ideas are not so much revealed as hinted at.

Even Richter, whose engagement with RAF is the focal interest of the opera, remains shorthand for the generic Artist. Evading all the big questions on this big topic, Richter/Meinhof-Opera feels and looks as if in development, like a sketch for a bigger work.

stifters dinge

Those who work with things (sculptors, architects, furniture makers) are often perplexed by the readiness with which more idealist disciplines (theatre, poetry) turn this material into signs and ideas. The result is frequently naive mystification, or embellishing fetishism: we have all seen signed urinals, soup cans, as well as their less rounded children—from derelict buildings employed as metaphors to artsy tapestries. What makes Heiner Goebbels’ Stifters Dinge so remarkable is that it does none of this, and has its audience enraptured. Its form is sui generis: a peopleless performance, or perhaps just a giant moving contraption. And yet, its workings are magical, for idealists and materialists alike.

The dramaturgy of Stifters Dinge is all in a sequence of apparently unrelated mechanical events: light changes, mechanical actions, sound clips and video projections. These are organised around a host of motifs: principally, the writings of Adalbert Stifter, a 19th century Austrian novelist whose prose is notoriously thickly furnished, upholstered, landscaped. (Literary lore has it that modernisation was already making advances into the order of things, and that 19th century naturalism was a kind of urgent stock taking.) Other motifs are the Renaissance dicovery of geometric perspective (chiefly Paolo Uccello’s paintings), utilitarian traditional music (Greek, Papuan, Colombian), voice recordings of Malcolm X. With technical perfection, the sequence of mechanical events coalesces into a world, all whilst remaining first and foremost mobile matter, without metaphors or superimposed meaning. The work builds into a deeply satisfying and meaningful totality by making us aware precisely of the bottomless materiality of its devices. When dry ice bubbles up in the three shallow water pools, seeing the trick does not stop the entire audience from holding their breath in awe. Stifters Dinge purges the stage of illusion and interpretation, but the ‘things’ that remain are neither threatening nor banal. Rather, they assume almost sacral fullness.

carnival of mysteries

Carnival of Mysteries, conversely, is an image of a carnival world. It has it all: tents, noise, nudity, candy floss, its own (inflated) currency and many short acts of varying skill and engagement. It is as entertaining and uneven as any carnival. It is also no more dramaturgically cohesive, nor exploratory: neither does it try to bring a superior level of artistry to the content, nor interrogate the form (in the vein of One-on-One Festival; RT99, p10). With many times more mini-shows than can be experienced in the allotted two hours, it is a somewhat frenzied experience, lacking the relaxed atmosphere of a fair. But the intensity does not translate into superb artistry, at least not in the fraction of the shows I witnessed. Should we be deconstructing it critically, suspending critical judgement, or witnessing it referentially? If Carnival is the answer, what is the artistic question? Is it a lowbrow event for a highbrow audience, with highbrow performers? Is it a replacement for Spiegeltent, which used to be the place at MIAF for circus, burlesque and other kinds of friendly lowbrow? A ‘carnival but of another kind,’ it is both too close, and once removed.

tomorrow, in a year

Tomorrow, In A Year, Hotel Pro Forma. Photo: Claudi Thyrrestrup.

Hotel Pro Forma’s Tomorrow, In a Year, an ‘electro opera’ about the life and work of Charles Darwin, was the most controversial show of this year’s MIAF (its response coming close to the outrage caused by Liza Lim’s The Navigator in 2008; opera is clearly fraught cultural ground in Melbourne). It is a conceptual work, with no plot to retell. It explores the thematic links between four moments in Darwin’s life—including the death of his daughter (potentially linked to his marriage to a first cousin)—and the implications of his theory . The endless mutability of the natural world, whose laws form us despite our pretended detachment, and whose laws we can never break, is the terrible heart of this work. It opens with potentially bewildering, undifferentiated stage sludge, an image of the original primordial soup of life; it ends as accelerating hydroponic chaos, or perhaps complex order?

The stage imagery is poor: only two planes of horizontal movement, no interaction between the performers, green laser beams and much dry ice. Using botanical drawings and video footage of water, Hiroaki Umeda’s algae-like choreography and the occasional verse about geological time and entombed carcasses, it explores a complete intangible: the fact that the material world is bigger than a human being, that we do not become through it, but are crushed by it.

But unlike Chesworth’s non-committal opera, it is fully exploratory. A note of the Romantic sublime runs through the work, unnoticed by those who bemoan its coldness. It unearths a potential Western counterpoint to the Japanese concept of ‘mono no aware’: the awareness of the dyingness of things, of the essential inability of matter to last. Just as cherry blossoms are less pretty than tragically transient, so is Tomorrow, In a Year not so much beautiful to watch as it is a despairing attempt to grasp cosmic complexity.

In the absence of meaningful stage action, enjoyment of this opera is strongly predicated on appreciating the music, by the Swedish electronic duo The Knife, which forms its narrative, emotional and intellectual core. It is a complex composition of natural and electronic noises, bel canto, house beats, borrowings from Purcell, early polyphony. And yet this collage of pop and found remains staunchly anti-metaphorical, a postmodernist pile of stuff asking to be understood literally: when Kristina Wahlin sings that “epochs collected here,” she is relating a geological fact, not a poetic truth.

While the work has been hailed as showing the future of the operatic form, it seems to succeed largely in musical terms. Visually, it attempts an abstract variation on a nature documentary, with results too reminiscent of late 1990s raves to be genuinely eligible for the label ‘innovation.’ Knowing that cyborgs, virtual reality and Dolly the Sheep were all the rage circa 1998 provides some dramaturgical solace, but does not compensate for Tomorrow, In A Year falling short of its promise.

2010 Melbourne International Arts Festival: Richter/Meinhof-Opera, direction, music, sound design David Chesworth, text David Chesworth (after Tony MacGregor), performers Kate Kendall, Hugo Race, lighting Travis Hodgson; ACCA, Oct 14-16; Stifters Dinge, concept, music, direction Heiner Goebbels; Malthouse, Oct 8-11; Carnival of Mysteries, creators, directors Moira Finucane, Jackie Smith, production design The Sisters Hayes; fortyfivedownstairs, Oct 6-30; Hotel Pro Forma, Tomorrow, In A Day, directors Kirsten Dehlholm, Ralf Richardt Strobech, music The Knife; Arts Centre, Melbourne, Oct 20-23

First published in RealTime, issue #100, Dec-Jan 2010, pg. 10.

Dec 11 2011
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MKA, politics, reviews, theatre

RW: The Economist + Addendum

1.

With The Economist, the little MKA theatre draws to a close an impressive year. Pushing for new writing in all forms (domestic, international, staged, rehearsedly read, commissioned, unearthed), its effort in getting dramatic text seen and heard has really made it apparent how little dramatic text one could get to before. We did not know what we did not have, yet it seems indispensible now, and that is certainly a great compliment to the MKA.

2.

The Economist, a theatrically astute meditation on Anders Behring Breivik, is one of the most exciting theatre works I have seen this year. The writing, joyous and rich, has been put on stage with great dramaturgical and directorial intelligence. There have been a few kinds of dramaturgy which this country has had a lot of accomplishment in: the anxious surrealism (Katz, The Rabble), the middle-class dreamy realism (Holloway, Hardie), the high-concept performance (Elbow Room, certain kinds of puppetry and circus); but until this work I do not think I have seen any political theatre worth writing home about. Even in its own, suburbanly evasive way, The Economist points to a homegrown way of tackling big questions that, on its own, is enough of a reason to recommend it. The season has been extended, and closes in a week’s time.

3.

In a nutshell, The Economist is based on the life and work of Anders Behring Breivik, the 32-year-old Norwegian who, earlier in 2011, killed 77 people in the Oslo area, largely teenagers on a summer camp associated with the Norwegian Labor Party. Fuelling Breivik’s one-man terrorist attack was a murky soup of right-wing ideas and beliefs: islamophobia, anti-feminism, white supremacy, cultural conservatism, ultranationalism, anti-multiculturalism and antipathy to something called ‘cultural Marxism’. Interestingly, only days before the premiere of the play, a panel of experts found Breivik insane, rather than a cold-blooded murderer, re-igniting the debate on whether a white European enacting right-wing beliefs is immune from the label of terrorism.

It seems that the consensus is that, no, he can only be an exception – Breivik’s misdeeds cannot be equated with his entire civilization, the way Al Qaeda for many synecdochically represents an entire violent, West-hating Islam. Alison Croggon thinks this is bad, Melbourne’s tabloid press (which kicked a small fuss over the play) that it is only natural. However, The Economist intervenes in this debate rather interestingly, bringing to life the many obsessions, delusions and shall we say quirks of Breivik’s existence. Desire to join the army; militant anti-feminism and general inability to treat women as human beings; delusional paranoias; fears of disease, extending to wearing a mask indoors and refusing to eat his mother’s food; obsession with his appearance; and, of course, a raging conviction that Europe must be defended from a range of evils (Marxists, Arabs, women) by the power of Knights Templar et cetera.

The extent to which Breivik’s madness is fuelled by societal input is entirely up for discussion, not least because he has, so far, acted in isolation. There is no army of Breivik. I am not sure that equating one kind of violence with another is the right methodology to discuss the broader questions of cultural orientalism, economic and cultural consequences of colonialism, and the general inadequacy of neo-liberal economics, fuelled rather more by ideology than any praxis, to nurture developing economies into prosperity. But, while MKA artistic director, and author of The Economist, Tobias Manderson-Galvin, was quoted in the said local tabloid press saying that Breivik was “no madder than John Howard or Peter Costello”, the play does not in any significant way say the same. Quite the contrary, The Economist is a portrait of a delusional psychotic. It produced an even less tangible connection between a society and an individual than The Baader Meinhof Complex did in regards to its own Red Army Faction – and the latter was generally understood as a thorough critique of its subjects.

4.

What happens in the play, though? Breivik has been renamed Andrew Bolt Berwick (a mash-up of one of Breivik’s pseudonyms and our own right-wing rabble-rouser Andrew Bolt), but otherwise it is a biopic. A series of vignettes from Breivik’s life – imaginatively dramatised, with great recourse to his many, many, many writings, from diaries to manifestos – is presented in almost-chronological order. Breivik held in the police for graffitying. Breivik undergoes plastic surgery in the USA. Breivik takes steroids in the gym. Swedish neo-Nazi singer Saga gives her condolences to the bereaved families. Breivik joins a hunting club. Breivik buys a gun in Prague. Breivik buys prostitutes, but is unable to have sex with them. There is pop-flavoured humour in each and every scene, drawn out by the strong performances and snappy direction. It is driven by Breivik’s loopy, increasingly unhinged worldview. The world of the play morphs from a hipster Scandinavia into a semi-surreal Image-Fiction of sorts, in which our own reality is mirrored through the ironic prism of psychotic delusion. It is beautiful throughout, but that is part of the irony.

Addendum: 4a.

The irony here is of a particular, post-2006, hipster kind. The entire cast is clad in a weird, IKEA-coloured uniform of beige pants and red jumpers, supposedly clothes Breivik was wearing when arrested, but also a colour palette of Scandinavia if there ever was one. There is a deer head on the wall. There is a Norwegian flag. Picture-perfect Scandinavia is among the first things mentioned in the text, and it is not the Scandinavia of welfare state and progressive taxation, but a Scandinavia of designer furniture and Roxette. In terms of mood and feel, this production takes not so much the political-satirical angle, but a detachedly-twee atmosphere-building found in all those films featuring Jason Schwartzman or Michael Cera. In other words, this is not a critique of some political evils of contemporary Norway, as much as a parodic picture of some dreamy, dislocated, retirement-village-like foreign land. The real event that is the pretext to this text seems rather accidental to the imaginative universe created atop. What happens in the play is rendered with such ironic over-the-topness as if the fact that it really happened is either uncertain or accidental to the text.

5.

Van Badham, the dramaturg and director of the play, is a major contributing force to the success of the production. The text has been pruned into a tight, dramaturgically cohesive work to an extent rarely seen in unfunded independent theatre in Australia. Taking enormous advantage of the simple space, and a few props, the cast of six announce each scene with its stage directions, use the props at hand to create a live score to each scene (effective, engrossing and much commented upon), and inhabit a vast range of characters gender-neutrally. Cast as Breivik is Zoe Dawson, a tall, blonde, slim and female human being, while the remaining cast is largely dark-haired, bearded, male. Masking tape Xs mark the location of objects.

All this Brechtianism has a funny effect of safety: we are simply not allowed to plunge into empathy for Andrew Berwick, the delusional right-wing terrorist. But Brechtian inquiry into systemic conditions of individual problems is, as I wrote earlier, not included: very, very few connections are ever drawn between Berwick the individual and Europe as a social context. In one, the family-friendly face of the neo-Nazi underground, Swedish singer Saga, expresses shock and horror at being nominated one of Breivik’s idols, in a honeyed, toasty voice, and ends with some best wishes, throaty and motherly-sounding and warm, for a strong white race, and a Nazi salute.

6.

More moments of this sort would have been in consonance with the production’s Brechtianism worn-on-sleeve, but they would have also counterpointed some of the stranger effects of the staging. For example, it is very hard not to sympathise with Zoe Dawson, whose girliness makes Andrew Berwick look like a helpless victim, and neutralises the violence directed towards women (of which there is much). Thus there is an extra layer of irony in this production: while the text is largely driven by the surreal humour of Breivik’s delusions (and ironically detached in its own right), the staging takes to the letter much of our (pre- or just conscious) sympathy for him, and depicts Andrew Berwick in a way so easy to empathise with that, if we shut our ears, this really could be a neo-Nazi text in which a young blonde woman is tragically led to her own demise by a crooked society of short, dark, bearded men. Something akin to The Birth of a Nation, or The Sound of Music (in Zizek’s reading).

7.

In between these layers of irony and a scaffold of utter craft, I don’t know that it is possible to even talk about an overall effect. I might speculate that we are distanced from Anders Breivik the terrorist, but encouraged to empathise with the poor Zoe Dawson, who happens to commit exactly the same murders as Breivik, but in fiction. In this reading, we can indulge in our little anti-social fantasies while never having to admit that they follow through to real deaths. Or, perhaps, I could conclude that Zoe Dawson’s Berwick is cut off from his social context while the playwright itself, and the entire theatre-going conversation around the play insists on Breivik as a symptom of a right-wing conspiracy. Therefore, the play sells itself to an audience as a work of ideological certainty, while it really tells a much more complex story of psychological disturbance, effectively subverting its own promise. Or, that this is a complex issue where the goal of the artist is to say: “See, Herald Sun accuses the arts of being a waste of taxpayer’s money on left-wing propaganda, but what we have really created, and continue to create, is complex and sophisticated analysis of a troubled human being, and we do that with our men as well as with yours…”. In this reading, the entire political purpose of the play might be to get an upper hand with the right-wing population of Australia and the right-wing media itself, all while having a very long laugh at the poor delusional Breivik…

All of these readings are possible, and I don’t think any one excludes the others. It is certainly a work wrapped up in multiple ironies, far and far beyond anything that was happening when David Foster Wallace was writing about irony. It is, in a certain sense, totally heartless; and it is also, in another sense, amoral – irony is a disavowal.

8.

It is also troublingly close to the in-yer-face forms that were blossoming in Europe throughout the 1990s, that have been superseded there, and that I cannot praise for originality for that reason. There seems to be some kind of law in place that Australia lags only ever about 10 years behind what is happening in the mainstream elsewhere (the margin is another story, more complex), and I would like to see that law revoked.

9.

But, for all its moral shortcomings, The Economist remains political theatre, and more interesting political theatre than anything I’ve seen in Australia in a very long time. It is also technically excellent. And I will always rather see something as bewilderingly thought-provoking as The Economist than something I know I will simply like.

Addendum: 9a.

I need to qualify my last paragraph: there is a moral shortcoming to this text, and it is its detached irony. The problem with all irony, but particularly the post-1970s irony of young people, and even more particularly of the one exercised by twenty-somethings in Australia in 2011, is that it is a self-conscious irony fuelled by:

1) naïveté about how the world works, fuelled by general lack of variegated and diverse life experience (suburban upbringing, lack of international travel, Australian media isolation from wider world and limited participation in social, political, etc global trends)
2) a sense of personal deficiency born out of a perceived absence of real life experience (the meaning of which is personally defined, but also societally as 1) )
3) a self-consciousness born out of 2)
4) an awareness that an entire cohort is feeling 3), and therefore this collective sense of individual deficiency is statistically incorrect, which results in
5) a suspicion that, if the feeling of 4) is universal, then somewhere down the line we have all been lied to, and there is no real life to be experienced in the first place…

…which brings to life the particular unreality and aestheticism in creating the hipster Scandinavia in The Economist, and is a troubling angle from which to be political. But:

6) all of this is further complicated by any international travel one does, or real experience (in the form of armed conflict, fame, enormous personal wealth, association with famous figures or places or events, etc). Such experiences, if in sufficiently small doses, add enough social capital to one’s life to get them ahead in the rat race of irony. If I may draw on personal experience now, I was told by a young male theatre artist from Melbourne, once upon a time, that he feels like he needs to travel to a war zone in order to experience ‘weird shit’.

The moral issue is that, in The Economist, the Breivik massacre and events leading up to it, are in no small dose presented as some such weird shit.

10.

The question of sensitivity/respect should be brought up now. It is not-a-little-bit alarming that almost every review I have read of the work insinuates that there is some political analysis in place here, although, to their credit, they all specify that it is in the service of dark humour. Is this disrespectful? Quite probably so, actually.

But how does one show respect to something one does not understand? Certainly not through false sympathy, in which one draws on one’s experience of pet hamster dying in order to conjure up emotions likely to experience at a massacre… There is a great deal of such theatre in Australia (and with a good justification, for this is a very peaceful country with a keen interest nonetheless in the dramatic human interest story, from however afar), all with political pretensions, and most of it is shit. It is falsely felt, its emotions insincere, its analysis inadequate. The naive irony of The Economist is, paradoxically if you wish, a more genuine response to a tragedy than false reverence would have been, in which we stand in silence while we feel the hysterical urge to giggle.

Further reading:
Cameron Woodhead
Chris Boyd in The Australian
Eugyeene in Promptside

Onomatopoeia on the controversy surrounding the play

The Economist by Tobias Manderson-Galvin, directed by Van Badham. Design by David Samuel, sound design by Nick McCorriston, lighting design by Julia Knibbs, costumes by Chloe Greaves. With Marcus Mckenzie, Zoey Dawson, James Deeth, Conor Gallacher, Sarah Walker and Peter Paltos. MKA Theatre, MKA Pop-Up Theatre, 73 Nicholson St. Abbotsford. Season extended until 16 December. Book here.

Sep 26 2011
10 Comments
classics, Daniel Schlusser, formal inquiry, masculinity, reviews, theatre, women

RW: The Dollhouse

The Doll’s House

0. NORA
I have seen two versions of this play just recently: Anja Maksić’s LUTKINA KUĆA/ZMIJA MLADOŽENJA (Doll’s House / Viper Groom) at Eurokaz in 2008 (here’s the account), and Thomas Ostermeier’s Schaubuehne production (called NORA) on DVD in 2010. I am not unusual in that. Henrik Ibsen’s The Doll’s House – which I may occasionally refer to as ‘Nora’ in this text, because that is its officially unofficial name in Europe – is the most performed play in the world. Even in Australia, a place fairly meagrely serviced with theatre by any global measure, there are doll’s houses springing up at universities, at Fringe time, at arts festivals (e.g. Mabou Mines’ DOLLHOUSE at Brisbane Festival 2006). This is a play staged for show, not for servicing the text. There is hardly anyone left today who doesn’t know this play, doesn’t know that Nora Helmer is the childlike wifey of a Norwegian banker Torvald, doesn’t know that she ends the play by slamming the door that leads out of her marriage, doesn’t know that this was a scandal on stage when it premiered. The Doll’s House is a play with a cultural significance that goes far beyond its pure literary value, and for this reason the text itself is distinctly unimportant to the productions of this play. The audience is not here for the plot. We know the play well. We are here for style. We are here to see how this particular creative team will grapple with the conundrum that is this text. We are here to see how she will solve the technical problems particular to the play (the changed condition of women, which largely neutralises the weight of the ending), and how she will claim her space in a very crowded arena of interpreters.

This is our ground zero, in the discussion of this work. This is a play that a director chooses in order to make a personal statement – not in order to honour the playwright. Western culture has already done that.

1. DANIEL SCHLUSSER
Everyone who is anyone seemed to be there at the opening of Daniel Schlusser’s THE DOLLHOUSE, a semi-revival of the work he made in late 2007 with VCA acting students (although ‘on’ them might be a better choice of words, the way choreography is done ‘on’ bodies). It was a praised work then, and a pocket-sized one on top. It was also the first work Schlusser had done in Melbourne in a long time, having come back from Germany not long ago, and the first of a series that would shake Melbourne’s theatre theatre scene up. From it followed: LIFE IS A DREAM in 2008, revived in 2010, THE ZOMBIE STATE in 2008, A href=”http://guerrillasemiotics.com/2009/04/rw-peer-gynt/”>PEER GYNT and POET NO. 7 in 2009, THE HOLLOW in 2010, and MACBETH just recently, but at Monash (raise hands ye who have seen it, and tell us what it was like).

Schlusser has attracted a devout following in these years*. There are very few theatre theatre directors in this town that could be classified as architects, as opposed to construction workers or builders. Apart from Schlusser, and by-now-expat Kosky, only Liminal Theatre’s Sitarenos and Draffin, and to some extent Marcel Dorney and Jenny Kemp (who use original text) come to mind**.

To some extent, there isn’t enough straight theatre in this country for radical interpretations to get desirable (on which I wrote here), and to an extent we are lacking the deep understanding of classical texts, their context, their impact, their importance, their critiques, their successors, in order to be able to read radical interpretations. We are all lacking this knowledge: the directors, the audiences, the critics.

Schlusser’s work, however, has gained traction despite its hermeneutic complexity, because he has made it a hallmark of his style to make works on at least two, sometimes six or more, levels. Almost every work of his I have seen has had the ability to function both as an extremely intelligent deconstruction of a canonical text, and a sort of freeform, chaotic stage event that one can appreciate, in a way similar to how Forced Entertainment’s BLOODY MESS could be appreciated, without having even the most general idea of how it related to any text at all. His version of Calderon’s Life is a Dream was, on the surface, a story of six siblings trapped in a basement their entire life, reminiscent of that year’s paramount tabloid story, who make up power games to fight boredom. His version of Ibsen’s troll fantasia Peer Gynt was a bogan wedding rehearsal, followed by a boozy house party. If you knew the text, each one of these productions was an absolute feast of intertextuality, with classic quotes reduced to non-verbal detail (Peer Gynt playing with some onions in the corner of the stage for about five seconds), but if you didn’t, you still felt embraced by the event. A certain kind of obscure, unfriendly hermeneuticism which is so often a quality of postmodernist theatre direction was here annulled.

But there are deeper qualities to Schlusser’s method. While turning Peer Gynt into a bogan party comes with a series of beneficial effects – shortening and rephrasing the text, finding surprising contemporary cultural equivalents for what are often alienatingly different circumstances of the original text – these are effects that are, on their own, enough to gain an Australian director the label ‘auteur’, and their importance might be highly overstated.

More interestingly, reducing the time of the work means reducing the entire play to a single situation, and this has allowed Schlusser to make some extraordinary statements about the source texts, far beyond a simple transposition. To place Calderon’s text into a basement of wild, unsocialised children is to locate the Baroque European court at the very extreme of incestuous, isolated idleness. Similarly, his PEER GYNT shed the frills – the ships, the trolls, the pyramids, the asylum – to become a story of a very immature little boy, fed the lines of his life by his mum and his girlfriend, at a party where nothing anyone does can really matter. It re-played the grand drama of the original play as soap-operatic melodrama, and found emotional hollowness in every utterance kept on stage. This movement semiotically sideways is in Schlusser’s work always surprising, but meticulously judged.

A consequence of this move sideways is that the text habitually stops being the vessel of truth, both of life generally, and of the true meaning of the performance, and turns into a voiced delusion: a game played by basement-bound children in LIFE IS A DREAM, or an invented adventure of a boy nobody is taking seriously in PEER GYNT. It is entirely legitimate to appreciate Schlusser’s productions as illustrations of how we use fiction to give grandeur, drama, height, to the banality of our reality.

Then there is the extraordinary quality to the performances he elicits. Schlusser is, like no other director I know, capable of stopping the actors from acting, and settling them into a long-lasting low-performativity timbre, in which they are indistinguishable from stage hands (but there are also never any stage hands here – everyone is part of the show). This has made the entire PEER GYNT, and large stretches of his other shows, look like improvisation, or the pre-dramatic beginning – you know those few minutes at the very beginning of a certain kind of performance, in which the actors arrive, fumble about, speak to each other in a low voice, settling into the stage? – of a dramatic performance. This kind of performance creates a constant, durational, low-intensity buzz, and is interesting to watch the way a street corner is interesting to watch. The energy of the stage swells and subsides, pockets of intensity build in corners, gigantic storms occasionally sweep the entire space, and sometimes the action is as dispersed as the shaking of leaves on a tree. It lends itself to being observed as rhythm, or patterns of energy, and is accessible through all sorts of swarmy, crowdy and weathery metaphors. Since everything important happens as detail, sometimes inaudible conversation, one becomes engrossed, and focused in a way that is really rare in our contemporary world. This is not TV or cinema focus, and not really a theatre kind of focus either. Rather, an anthropological, ethnographic, fieldwork sort of focus.

I have never found time to write a reflection on Schlusser’s last big work, a version of Agatha Christie’s THE HOLLOW. I will have to make a longish aside for it here, because that work showed a real evolution in these very qualities. Schlusser condensed the entire crime, investigation and revealing of the murderer to a single, long garden party, in which everything that happens in Christie’s crime happened, in a linear fashion, one event after another, on a large large stage, with a large large cast. Apart from showing the entirely non-tragic, inevitable mechanics of Agatha Christie’s world – an interesting intervention into the standard dramatic composition of her oeuvre – it was the first time that anthropology came to my mind as an apt metaphor for Schlusser’s poetics. The killing of John Christow was presented on this stage with an engaged disinterest comparable to the way the killing of an antelope would be depicted in a nature documentary. But it seemed that Schlusser was starting to play with re-introducing dramatic performance and stage effects into his weathery work, to exciting effect; and the slippage between levels of unreality had by now assumed a baroque complexity.

Another thing worth noting before we continue is that Schlusser’s large-cast works have a poetics distinct from his small-cast works. Whether this is intentional or not I am not sure. The height of performativity differs, and with it the entire experience. In all of his productions so far, Schlusser allows his performers to play with the original text, to chew on it and spit it out at times. The effect is often that of play-acting, sometimes that of voicing a role only semi-consciously. However, the rule of thumb has been, the smaller the cast, the longer and more weighty the text. Interestingly, it is as if Schlusser doesn’t trust a small swarm to hold the audience’s attention as well as a large swarm can. Whatever the reason, large-cast performances hold all of the qualities I have been discussing better: they are less theatrical theatrical, and more like nature documentaries, than his small works, which are remain more focused, less loosely paced, more tied to the original text, more dramatic, and quite simply less unusual and inventive. THE DOLLHOUSE is one such small- cast work.

2. RESTRAINT AND EXCESS
Schlusser writes, in his notes, about restraint and excess being the core of this particular dollhouse (I would love to be able to consult his notes further, but I am writing this from a hotel room in Nagoya, far away from my desk). I missed the original, 2007 production on which this short remount is based, so I cannot compare, but the current, 2011 production is one dollhouse centred around consumption, gratification, and people’s ability to resist their urges.

Australian theatre, interestingly, is not hugely concerned with consumerism (is it because it is too ungenteel a topic?, or is it because theatre is for rich people?), but this is a recurrent question for Schlusser. PEER GYNT, THE ZOMBIE STATE and THE HOLLOW had at their core money, what money can buy, and how one’s ability to buy things affects one’s social value and self-worth, in a contemporary reality largely pinpointed as Australian. More than anything, Schlusser is concerned with what we might call class, but understood more deeply, as the effect of a certain kind of monetary power on the psyche. Similarly to Christos Tsiolkas, Schlusser is interested in what we might term the essential, profound amorality of contemporary Australian society – a certain absence of core values produced by atheism, Australian national narrative, and what many people I speak to call ‘the effect of the Howard years’. Both of these story-tellers are prepared to go beyond sparkling drawing-room satire (from David Williamson’s uneven oeuvre to Hayloft Project’s excellent DELECTABLE SHELTER, and dig into the moral barrenness of lives in which plasma-screen TV becomes a measure of a great deal more than one’s disposable income.

When we meet them, Nora and Torvald have been very successfully transposed to contemporary Australia – Torvald has just got a promotion at the Macquarie Bank (Australian bank known for its aggressive investments – for those of my foreign readers, because every Australian knows Macquarie Bank). Nora is a yummy mummy, living a life of shopping and parties, with sidekick Dr Rank. The simple patriarchy of 19th-century Norway has become a more complicated story: Nora is a sex kitten alright, but Torvald is now the PlayStation husband, performing his masculinity through absence and silence, playing shoot ‘em up games from an Eames armchair for most of the play. If Ibsen’s Nora had to be a chirpy little lark for a husband who treated her like a child (monitoring her candy intake, among other things), and if their marriage functioned as a happy game of pretend-domination and performed immaturity, Nikki Shiels works hard on being a sex dolly, offering a range of pornographic services in order to get her husband’s attention away from the computer game. This is not a household based on honesty, but two people’s unspoken fantasies of the other sex welded into a marriage. But Australian contemporary masculinity is a complex thing, lined with taciturn violence, where aggression is expressed more often as subdued undermining than paternal reprimanding: caught with marshmallows, Nora is seated in the Eames chair and made to gorge on them, while Torvald makes her repeat “nobody likes a chubby mummy”.

Everything here, be it sex, money or lollies and jobs, becomes a transactional good, a reward, a bribe: excess comes to signify happiness, and deprivation is meted out as punishment. There is a capitalist logic to this emotional world, very similar to that of Jonathan Franzen’s Corrections, in which all love and all sex are simply transactions that raise or lower the characters’ social standing. But where Franzen shines a very harsh light on the Lambert family, Schlusser keeps his stage pastel-lit, in a way both ironic and earnest, critical and gentle. The constant gratification, an eternal present tense of morality, creates a household engaged in an ongoing party (another Schlusserian constant): the apex of the production is a beautiful, wordless celebration of gifts bestowed upon the house guests by Nora, with Torvald’s money, a choreography of Christmas lights, to the music of Sigur Ros. It is a seductive, pleasant fantasy world, and there is a surprising sweetness to this production. Even when Mrs Linde and Krogstad, whose emotionally honest romance provides a strong counterweight to the emotional candy floss of the Helmers, decide to let all secrets be spilled, they do it in a well-meaning spirit “I’ve been here for three days… nobody talks”.

Nikki Shiels. Photo: Marg Horwell.

For all the meta-frills and naturalistic banality, you can see this is a very faithful rendition of Ibsen’s play, and as such perhaps a lesser Schlusser work, certainly for my taste. The transposition is accurate, the interpretation convincing and intelligent. Still, it is a remount of an early work, and it anticipates rather than further developing the extraordinary theatricality of PEER GYNT or THE HOLLOW. There is a lot of acting here, a lot of text delivered in a fairly straight way, and we have by now seen Daniel Schlusser attempt and achieve more. I am much tougher here than I would be with almost any other Australian director, because Schlusser operates in another league entirely, and should continue to do so. It often feels here that the text is used as a crutch, to fill the stage (the swarm is too small) or to give shape to the performance – and I understand that this is a ludicrous thing to write, but I count on enough people to have seen PEER GYNT to understand what I mean. For all its merits, THE DOLLHOUSE is still reasonably conventional theatre, and Schlusser’s good name in my books is largely due to his other works. But, as I said earlier, there is a distinct separation between his small- and large-cast works, and this was a small one.

3. LOU SALOME AND THE ENDING
I had never quite believed in Ibsen’s ending of The Dollhouse. Nora’s final transformation from chirpy doll to emancipated woman seemed mechanical and too sudden, like a dramatic device with no grounding in realistic psyhology, until I read Lou Salomé’s interpretation of the play. Salomé, an early Freudian, wrote an exquisite psychoanalytical analysis of Ibsen’s female characters. In her interpretation, which I found eye-opening, Nora is a woman who not so much acts in someone else’s story, as stretches the limits of her own fantasy until she can no longer believe in it. Replacing one father figure with another, she responds to perceived love the only way she knows: by building her identity as an object of joy, as a happiness-bringer, a 19th-century manic pixie dream girl (this Natalie Portman in Garden State). According to Holly Welker, “MPDGs are said to help their men without pursuing their own happiness, and such characters never grow up, thus their men never grow up.” This is as good explanation as any to the dynamic of the Helmer marriage. Salomé:

Helmer’s joy in merriment and loveliness is, at the same time, the ordinary person’s aversion to struggle and seriousness – to anything that could disturb the aesthetic comfort in which he enjoys himself and his existence. The apparent moral rigor that helps Helmer gain prestige, his need to appear blameless and to keep his dignity unblemished – all this self-control in daily life ultimately arises out of the same egotistical perspective on pleasure.

For Nora, love requires a certain sacrifice of self, and according to Salomé she does gain strength through this sacrifice, to the point that, when she realises that Torvald is not prepared to do the same for love, she resigns from the game. For Salomé, Nora’s final disappointment in Torvald is akin to a loss of God, a total demystification. Her love is revealed to be a hoax, the object of her love unworthy of it. (Note that there is a mystical quality to this kind of love, something femininity has not yet gotten divorced from – Pauline Reage’s Story of O might be read as the Holy Testament of this worldview. It is also deeply, deeply romantic – something Elfriede Jelinek picks up on in her sequel to Ibsen’s play, What Happened After Nora Left Her Husband.) Salomé:

What all the worries and experiences of the entire recent past had not taught her is not accomplished in one instant: she suddenly sees life as it is, as it stands before her in the shape of Helmer, an ordinary person, who is tormented by fear and selfishness. All her life and her thought were concentrated in him, it was in him that her life took on its truth and self-evidence – it could be demystified and destroyed only in him. (…) Something strange and immense occurred in her. All her slowly awakened strength and independence, everything that she had so humbly and zealously collected as a present, a gift of love – her entire, inner being – now rears up and fights its way free from this love in an enormous protest.

When Nora slams the door to the dollhouse of her 19th-century marriage, she is not going anywhere much. She cannot work, she will never see her children again, it is a suicide in more than one sense. This was an entirely unrealistic ending at the time it premiered, an unexpected coda to what was until then a simple bourgeois story of drawing-room intrigue. It is said that women stood and applauded, and men sat in shock. What happened on that stage was staging of something impossible. It was performing a dream, a Marina Abramović moment. This was the original effect of The Doll’s House that cannot be replicated anymore. The technical problem of The Doll’s House today is how to credibly stage this ending, how to give it the devastating impact it had then. The underlying assumption of tragedy is, thankfully, no longer possible. A woman would be leaving a marriage with children, off to a menial job (or three) and – in Australia at least (as opposed to, say, Iceland) – a world in which single mothers are still routinely assumed to create somewhat delinquent children. But still, this is not a tragic ending anymore. So Schlusser resuscitates the alternative ending, one that Ibsen had to provide for actresses that refused to perform the ending: an awful dialogue in which Torvald shows Nora her peacefully sleeping children and asks how she could possibly leave them, her dear little angels. No, she couldn’t, she decides, and stays.

I cannot quite make up my mind about the ending to this production. It strikes some false notes with me, but also some scintillatingly right ones. In retrospect, it looks quite smart. At the time, however, I was unconvinced, in particular by Kade Greenland’s Torvald, whose anger I found neither convincing nor frightening. Ostermeier’s NORA, for all its banalities, managed to create an enormous sense of physical threat, fear and loss of faith – when his Nora shoots Torvald in her Lara Croft costume, I understood why she would. When Schlusser’s Nikki Shiels comes out in a tracksuit and has a long protofeminist dialogue with her husband, whom she has now decided to leave, the production is, at least on the opening night, at least for me, hitting between the keys for the first time of the evening. And yet, upon her suggestion that they give back their rings, here is Torvald saying “I paid for both”, in a moment of majestic truth. Here is a man whose morality exists as righteousness, and whose righteousness is based on the money he earns, and who reacts instinctively to insult – in one line. Then, revealing a real, blonde sleeping child pierces your heart, because no child was until then visible on stage. And yes, this is an incredibly hard scene to get right – but it is also the scene on which we judge the success of any interpretation of this play. When Torvald hugs his daughter, the possibility of him having just acquired another songbird is terrifying, but the text has been largely kept, and a mother, however irresponsible, would today probably not be getting out of a marriage without her children. Is this a passive-aggressive, inconsistent, emotionally manipulative man, a product of contemporary patriarchy? Perhaps. Is this a woman who speaks like she knows what she wants, but doesn’t really? Or is she a woman who chooses yet another sacrifice of self, in the all-too-short moment of reflection as she is walking off the stage? Perhaps. It was not clear. After so much precision, I suddenly saw the interpretation missing its mark.

I understand and share Schlusser’s suspicion towards Nora’s emancipation. I cannot quite shake off the impression that modern-day Nora still ends up in a territory closer to the owlish disintegration of self announced in Story of O than in a fulfilled feminist dream. But this confusion that women’s lib has brought us is grasped so uncertainly by this ending, which itself would need to be less confused if it were to pinpoint it properly. This is a very minor criticism of a work which is extraordinary on so many levels – but the effect of a work of theatre is largely in its landing.

* of which I am a somewhat-member; the tone of this review will hopefully explain how and why
** although I am speaking here as a person who has managed to miss every single production by Four Larks and Mutation Theatre, please bear with this gap in my knowledge

SEE ALSO (and disagree with me, because Daniel Schlusser’s work ought to be discussed more than it presently is):
Alison Croggon’s review
Cameron Woodhead’s review

The Dollhouse, adapted from the play by Henrik Ibsen, directed by Daniel Schlusser. Set design by Jeminah Reidy, costumes by Tiffany Abbott, lighting by Kimberly Kwa, sound by Martin Kay. With Nikki Shiels, Kade Greenland, Edwina Wren, Josh Price, Daniel Schlusser and Cate Bastian/Gabrielle Abbott. Fortfive Downstairs, September 15-25.

Jul 29 2011
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MKA, programming, reviews, theatre, women

Review: J.A.T.O.

Until mid-July, I was in Zagreb, a place with a big beautiful central square, a predisposition to extraordinary negativity and bitterness (on which in another post), and an excellent theatre scene (but try telling that to a Zagrepčan, and they do look at you like you have just deeply embarrassed yourself by disclosing the lowness of your standards and the narrowness of your horizon).

But, while there, I had the opportunity to acquire one of the more recent issues of Frakcija, a very good theatre magazine, dedicated to the last decade of Croatian theatre writing, which included a generous fragment of Vedrana Klepica’s J.A.T.O., a play I would later have the opportunity to see staged in Melbourne, at the MKA. The world is at times a manageably-sized place. Continue reading →

May 22 2011
4 Comments
audience, essays, Melbourne Fringe, performance, theatre

Critic as audience member

Here is a question that has bothered me for a long time: how does one enter the theatre if one is going to publicly write about the event later?

This is a question quite distinct from the usually posed ‘what is the role of the critic?’, ‘what should the critic do?’, or even the more self-indulgent ‘how do I write my criticism?’. (Those are often discussed, for example by Andrew Fuhrmann, Alison Croggon, Andrew Haydon, Chris Boyd, and everyone the quote and link to in these articles.) This is a question of state of mind before the critic gets to do what a critic does.

I’ve been mulling over this question for as long as I’ve been getting invitations to shows, because of the implied reciprocity of this exchange.

It seemed to me that there are two ways of approaching this problem: one can try to be the ideal audience member, or the average audience member.

Here we encounter a difference between a reviewer and a critic, and also a difference between the assumed role of criticism, and the practice of criticism, between, say, the Anglophone and the continental European countries.

The kind of criticism practised in newspapers here, in London and in New York, is something we could call arts reporting. It involves going to a theatrical event, and coming back with a report on how it went; whether it was good; whether it did stuff well. It is, in that sense, clearly a kind of writing that requires a verdict; a judgement; a number out of five stars. There’s a position of authority there. But, because the point of the verdict is basically to tell the reader whether they should spend their money on this event or not, the critic must approach the event by trying to experience it from the point of view of their average reader. In fact, critics of this genus often talk about their responsibility to this reader (see, for example, the comments to Alison Croggon’s review of Baal.

But there is at least one other kind of criticism, which is more commonly encountered in European publications, and which so puzzled Andrew Haydon in 2006 that he wrote a blog post wondering: is it possible that criticism may not need to say whether a piece of theatre is good or bad? I have grown up reading this kind of criticism, which analyses and theorises about the theatrical event, draws parallels between the logic of the work and sciences, social sciences, theories, the world today. Haydon gives an excellent example in his blog spot; Žižek’s film criticism is a similar beast. This sort of criticism operates with a logic of philology, rather than judgement. It’s Barthesian; it responds to the text, rather than assessing it. It reads through the influences on the text, through its lineage, its peers. Clearly, it is done by an ideal, rather than an average reader, and it is read for explanation, clarification, thought provocation, rather than judgement. As Haydon points out, however, excellent thoughts can be had of very bad theatre. A lot of writing in RealTime, in performance journals, and wherever live art is written about, follows this model.

Each genus of criticism responds to its context: in London and New York, a competitive commercial world, expensive tickets, theatre understood as entertainment. In Europe, a publicly subsidised sector, long seasons, theatre understood as a part of the evolving cultural conversation (no different to books, magazines, cinema).

In terms of how they understand the position of critic as an audience member, there is a paradox to both.

Critic-as-judge assumes authority, but needs to channel the experience of the average audience member. She needs to do that while sitting in the best seats in the house, for which she paid nothing. She has, more than likely, seen an enormous amount of theatre, and is therefore attuned to the trends of the place and time (even if she, often, has a very sketchy knowledge of theatre in other places and other times). Criticism here comes from a place of profound juggle, it seems to me, of the right to have authority versus the need not to be more cerebral than the average reader; of the need to have a taste (a good taste) while not having preferences; of not letting one’s theatre education blur one’s sense of what the reader might enjoy. And, most importantly, not to succumb to the bitterness or fatigue that often comes from the lifestyle of the person who goes out to theatre almost every night, and then writes until the wee hours.

Critic-as-philologist, on the other hand, is the cerebral interpreter, her position is the one of privilege: she has read philosophers, theorists, critics, she gets the good seats, she has seen other theatre in other places. At the same time, so often the piece of theatre written about is not more than an initial blip, a catalyst for a piece of writing that may, actually, be more relevant to the critic’s intellectual project than to the work. This approach is so often based on Patrice Pavis’s semiotic analysis, which assumes the work of theatre to be a 3-dimensional text, a kind of semiotic structure, which can be read and analysed and so on, that I think it misinterprets theatre itself as a sort of unmoveable, unchanging thing. And it runs into huge trouble whenever it tries to talk about performance works that should be encountered incidentally, that are audience-driven or -responsive, or that affect the spectator on the level of affect or emotion, rather than intellect.

Most of our Australian critics, with the exception of RealTime, write in the first genre. RealTime tends to be of the second kind.

Both need to be thought about a bit more, however. The ideal and the average audience member. How much should one know beforehand? Should one have read the play? (In Anglophone countries: no. In Europe: yes.) Should one sit in the best seats in the house? Should one pay for the ticket? Both actually become very hard to practice, once you start seriously thinking about the implications of all these factors on your experience.

In particular, attending and writing about audience-driven performance in the past few years has made me very interested in this question, simply because the poetic skeleton of such performance is the audience experience. I find myself question my responses: are mine typical responses, or are they specific to me? Is it alright that they are specific to me, can I write about them anyway, or should I keep this to myself because it’s irrelevant to the work? (I think these questions are also more important to someone like me, who often feels like an outsider to the culture, than they would be to a dead white male.) I don’t know that the artist could answer these questions – a lot of the time they are themselves interested in the effects of the mechanism they have set in motion. But the questions remain.

The question remains particularly pertinent because, while I do enjoy audience-driven performance, I find myself inordinately annoyed by works that seem to be only tokenistically audience-driven; in which audience serves the role of the trendy trope, the way video featured in theatre in the 1990s. Performances in which the audience is supposedly given freedom to act, but is actually led around on a leash, are possibly the most infuriating kind of theatre I can think of (far worse than, say, bad opera).

So the quality in such works is inextricably related to the quality of the experience. Or rather, it is impossible, or at least very hard, to judge them impassionately, or in any way objectively. I do see such criticism around, but I do not think it’s possible to analyse, in some semiotic sense, the experience of being bathed by a stranger, being baited by a stranger, being blindfolded and led around, or encountering a performance by accident; they have to be approached as experience. And, while they’re approached as experience, it is absolutely impossible to avoid the question of whether this was pleasant, unpleasant, frightening, annoying, and so on. In fact, these performances are often geared towards an affective or emotional response, and omitting this aspect from analysis is a form of willing blindness.

But again the question: typical or ideal? And what does one do when one has to write about it later?

For example, at Melbourne Fringe 2009 I was going to see Take Off Your Skin. The performance was to happen scatteredly and unannouncedly around the city. Now, how do I make sure I see something I need to see, if it is supposed to be experienced in an incidental manner? The media person at Fringe helpfully suggested that she give me times and places, and told me where the final, larger event would take place. In the end, I didn’t take the times and places of all the appearances of all the performers, and thank God for that. While sitting in a cafe in Degraves St, waiting to go to the final event, a bunch of blue-dressed performers walked through – unannounced, unexpected, incidental. They shook the lane a bit; disappeared. It was beautiful.

The larger event featured a large audience, some cameras, media. In terms of performance itself, there wasn’t enough structure, skill, preparation or spectacle to keep such an audience entertained. I think we were all reasonably bored, on the level of experience (while we might have all been very engaged on the conceptual level, the level of ‘isn’t this clever!’). In fact, the audience cum performers became the event itself for most passers-by. They saw us watching, before they saw the performance itself. I would go as far as to suggest that the audience probably ruined the performance, by severing the link between the performance and the incidental activities around it, the incidental audience, the qualities of the public space in which it took place.

In this case, the typical experience does not exist, or may not have anyway: there was no guarantee of experiencing an incidental performance by accident. On the other hand, the ‘ideal’ experience (knowing where to be at what time, seeing the thing beginning to end) was actually far from satisfactory, even frustrating.

I imagine that this question will become more and more tangled as audience-driven work continues to be made. But I do hope that artists will themselves become more in tune with the experience of their audience; and that the critics may learn to regard their experience as one, too.

May 09 2011
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essays, multiculturalism, Simon Stephens, theatre

Simon Stephens: Theatertreffen keynote speech

Only a few nights ago, Simon Stephens gave a keynote speech at Theatertreffen, the most prestigious place in Germany to have your work shown. The keynote is now available at the Theatertreffen blog, and is worth reading in full. It questions a whole host of the usual Anglophone assumptions about what ‘proper theatre’ is. As a non-Anglophone, I cannot make such claims, or at least cannot make them with the same effect. It comes across as nasty criticism. And, to some extent, it is none of my business (or it wouldn’t be, if I wasn’t living in Melbourne). But for those reasons it’s a text I hope many, many will read.

For copyright purposes (although I suspect Germans may not care about this too much), I am reporting only (my personal) highlight:

There is an assumption that I continue to confront when I talk about my work in Germany to other English theatre makers. It is the same assumption they have always had. They talk about it in the way people used to talk about food in England in the seventies and football in the eighties. It wasn’t proper food. It wasn’t proper football. It’s not proper theatre.

It sits under that artistic process of assimilation that happens on the rare occasions that British theatres programme work from abroad. We anglicise its presentation. We make actors act naturalistically and sets evoke the same naturalism. We chose the plays that most accord to our assumptions of what a play should be.

It infuriates me. Because the experience of seeing my plays produced in other countries has been such a constant provocation. Travel, in particular but not exclusively in my working relationship with Sebastian has allowed me to see the assumptions sitting under our methods of working in the UK, our deference to the author, our hunger for success, our need to interpret meaning through language and our distrust of the non-naturalistic as being culturally specific, not innate and also, at worst as being limited or small-minded. The polite arrogant assumptions of a small-minded nation.

I couldn’t have known that if I hadn’t have travelled. The closest I came to knowing that was in those experiences of reading plays written outside my theatre culture or better, seeing them produced. My assumptions were interrogated, my techniques exposed. This allowed me to take control of them. It empowered me. It exhilarated me. And it frightened me too. Sometimes when watching a play in a foreign culture you don’t know what to expect. Sometimes when planning a theatrical initiative or a conversation you don’t know expect. It’s like you’re eyes are closed. It’s like you’re blindfolded. Sometimes you step out into the rehearsal room or the theatre, the auditorium or the lecture hall and it’s terrifying and you fall. And not knowing that possibility exaggerates the fear. And sometimes, perhaps occasionally, you fly a bit. And when you do, I think it can be extraordinary.

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